The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.

I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn’t, so I think it is possibly the end.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

A novel and its writer are inseparable: you are your books. A play’s not like that at all. ‘Abandonment’s not mine – it’s everyone’s. I wanted it to be a co-operative thing because I was...

Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was – wasn’t everything in her head real too? What if there was no...

Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.

On the outside of the bedroom door there was a plaque that said Valerie. On the way up, Jackson noticed that other bedrooms also had names – Eleanor, Lucy, Anna, Charlotte.Jackson wondered how you decided...

The past is what you take with you.

I’ve always loved mysteries, the something there that you didn’t know, and with ‘Case Histories’ I just decide to make that more up-front.

She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in...

I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere –...

Fairy tales opened up a door into my imagination – they don’t conform to the reality that’s around you as a child. I started reading when I was three and read everything, but I wanted...

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because ‘What if?’ is the big thing.

History is all about ‘what ifs

He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once...

If you don’t have a unique voice, then you’re not really a writer.

I mean what else is there for a woman to do if she doesn’t want to go from the parental to the marital home with nothing in between? ‘An educated woman,’Millie amended. ‘An educated woman,’...

I think you have to learn for yourself how to write. I’m slightly mystified by creative writing courses – God love them – because I can’t understand how you can explain a process that I...

Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a...

It was the kind of summer evening that made Ursula want to be alone. ‘Oh,’ Izzie said, ‘You’re at an age when a girl is simply consumed by the sublime.’ Ursula wasn’t sure what she...

Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I’m totally insane.

Secrets had the power to kill a marriage,she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said,it was secrets that could save a marriage.

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness

The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.

Mum had a Charles-and-Diana wedding mug that had survived longer than the marriage itself. Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. “Gone,” she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. “Just like...

It was failing part of my Ph.D. that led me into novel-writing. By then I was 29, had remarried and had a second baby. It struck me that I’d lost my path in life and...

My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women’s magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I’d had my writing validated, and the first thing I’d...

Her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take the place. What that ‘something’ was she had no idea.

Because I’ve a track record of talking about books I never write, in Australia they think I’m about to write a book about Jane Austen. Something I said at some festival.

She was tremendously fond of Ralph. Not hounded by love the way some women were. With Crighton she had been teased endlessly by the idea of it, but with Ralph it was more straightforward. Again...

You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.

I don’t have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I’m big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning...

Pam wasn’t what Gloria would have called a friend, just someone she had known for so long that she had given up trying to get rid of her.

Certainly I had a really terrible time with ‘Emotionally Weird.’ When I finished it, I thought, ‘I can’t write any more.’

…and no man gave you a fur coat without expecting to receive something inreturn. Except for one’s husband, of course, who expected nothing beyond modest gratitude.

But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country – The Rest Of My Life.

It’s been said that the men in my books have been absent, or weak, or creepy.

If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn’t mind being their mother.

In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner...

I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel....

And then suddenly she was on her feet, her heart knocking in her chest, a sudden familiar but long-forgotten terror triggered- but by what?

Because I write fiction, I don’t write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as ‘I’ – you...

Maybe this was why people filled their house with stinking cats, so they didn’t notice that they were alone, so they wouldn’t die without a living soul noticing.

Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.

Everyone said, ‘Well, you’re very old for a first novel,’ and I said, ‘How do you write when you haven’t lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight...

She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn’t even have the strength to feel guilty.

Without siblings you get quite a skewed vision of yourself and of the world. I always felt I didn’t understand how it worked. I remember feeling quite lonely.

I need to be very isolated to write, and unfortunately isolation is often quite difficult to find. My ideal writing environment would be a country house hotel in the middle of nowhere, with full room...

Teddy didn’t really understand the attraction of the dark side for the young these days. Perhaps because they had never experienced it. They had been brought up without shadows and seemed determined to create their...